Rounding to nearest ten, hundred and thousand

At a barbecue to celebrate the end of the soccer season, 1,354 hot dogs were served. Round the number of hot dogs to the nearest 10.

All right, let me just rewrite the number: 1,354. Now let's just remember our places. This is the ones, this is the tens, this is the hundreds place, and this is the thousands place. Now they want to round the number of hot dogs to the nearest 10, so round it to the nearest 10 here.

So right now we have five tens, but in order to round, we have to look to the next smallest place. So we'll look to the ones, and we have four ones here. And so, because this number is less than five, we round down. So, because this is less than five, we round down. If you round down, you get to exactly 1,350, or you say 1,3 and 50. We have rounded to the nearest 10: 1,350 hot dogs.

Let's do another one. So here we're told the attendance at a local basketball game was 8,643 people. Round the attendance to the nearest 100, and like always, pause this video and see if you can figure that out. Let’s see: 8,643. We want to round to the nearest 100, so we go one place to the right of that and we say, okay, is this greater than or less than? Is this less than five or greater than or equal to five?

Since it is less than five, we round down. And so we are going to round down to 8,600. So we have rounded to the nearest 100: 8,600 people.

Let's do one more. The city of Joyville has 87,318 residents. Round the number of people who live in Joyville to the nearest thousand. So we have 87,318. We want to round to the nearest thousand, so once again we go one place to the right. We see that it is less than five, and so we're going to round down.

We are going to round down to 87,000. That is the nearest thousand: 87,000. Now, since all of the examples, we ended up rounding down, let me just show you what would have happened when we round up. If it had been 87,500, you go one place to the right and you say, hey, this is five or larger.

So in this case, you would round up. You would round the thousands up to 88,000 in this situation. So you go one space to the right. One place value to the right: if that is less than five, then you round down; if it is five or greater, you round up.